The Collected Letters, Volume 20

I must not complain; I am bound to rejoice rather: but I did not so much need the new money I am to get; and I can honestly
say the feeling of faithfulness to a hero's great memory and to my own small task in regard to that is nearly the only consideration
that practically weighs with me. The unmusical or musical voice of critics, totally ignorant of the matter for most part,
and of most insincere nature at any rate, gives me little pain and little pleasure any more. We shall be dead soon, and then
it is only the fact of our work that will speak for us through all eternity. One thing I do recognise with much satisfaction,
that the general verdict of our poor loose public seems to be that Oliver was a genuine man, and if so, surely to them a very surprising one.1 It will do them much good, poor bewildered blockheads, to understand that no great man was ever other; that this notion of theirs about “Machiavelism,” “Policy,” and so forth, is
on the whole what one might call blasphemous—a real doctrine of devils.

1. Admiration of Cromwell had emanated from unlikely sources. Bronson Alcott, who had not been much taken with TC when they met in 1842 (see TC to RWE, 19 July 1842, where his community at Fruitlands, 1843–44, was misdated), wrote to a friend in Jan., soon after reading Cromwell: “What a noble Book this last of Carlyles for the study of modern man. I know not if a more commanding word has been spoken
by Mortal since Cromwell's time. It is counsel for all men. All my past reading seems languid and pale beside those strenuous
and flashing thoughts of Carlyle. It comes quite opportunely too. Cromwell and his Time are admirable studies for us, fierce
Republicans as we are; and may help us see the vast difference between Royal Self-Rule and a Government of Brutes and Clowns.
His time is a Class of ours. Our Country is no less charged with Revolt, no less luxuriant the crop of Unbelief. Sorcery and
Confusions dire, shooting forth in the Social Hotbed. Our fortunes too seem fearfully forecast in those of the English Commonwealth”
(Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, ed. R. L. Herrnstadt [Ames, Iowa, 1969] 125).